22 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, n 



To me . . . this advocacy of the cause of the poor 

 appealed very strongly . . . because ... I had had the 

 opportunity of seeing for myself something of the way 

 the poor live. Not much, indeed, but still enough to 

 give a terrible foundation of real knowledge to my 

 speculations. 



After telling how he came to know something of 

 the East End, he proceeds : 



I saw strange things there among the rest, people 

 who came to me for medical aid, and who were really 

 suffering from nothing but slow starvation. I have not 

 forgotten am not likely to forget so long as memory 

 holds a visit to a sick girl in a wretched garret where 

 two or three other women, one a deformed woman, sister 

 of my patient, were busy shirt -making. After due 

 examination, even my small medical knowledge sufficed 

 to show that my patient was merely in want of some 

 better food than the bread and bad tea on which these 

 people were living. I said so as gently as I could, and 

 the sister turned upon me with a kind of choking passion. 

 Pulling out of her pocket a few pence and halfpence, and 

 holding them out, "That is all I get for six -and -thirty 

 hours' work, and you talk about giving her proper food." 



Well, I left that to pursue my medical studies, and it 

 so happened the shortest way between the school which I 

 attended and the library of the College of Surgeons, where 

 my spare hours were largely spent, lay through certain 

 courts and alleys, Vinegar Yard and others, which are 

 now nothing like what they were then. Nobody would 

 have found robbing me a profitable employment in those 

 days, and I used to walk through these wretched dens 

 without let or hindrance. Alleys nine or ten feet wide, 

 I suppose, with tall houses full of squalid drunken men 

 and women, and the pavement strewed with still more 

 squalid children. The place of air was taken by a steam 



